Played through for first time, sadly looked at walkthrough long before buying the game. Vaguely rembering the final battle, I left a slot open for Shadow Lugia and brought the other uber shadows.
I had:
Level 59 Vaporeon
Level 60 Claydol
Shadow Snorlax
Shadow Lapras
Shadow Salamence
XD001
26 Ultra Balls
12 Timer Balls
A few other random balls
Lots of hyper potions, revives, PP items (Only used a few throughout the game) and a few full restores/max revives
(Spent all money on balls, and I certainly did need them. You get plenty of items throughout the game, the challenge is in getting all those shadows without wasting the precious Master Ball.)
I got all of his Pokemon, including Lugia, without the Master Ball. Used all the ultra balls and most of the timer balls, although I got Rhydon in a great ball. Exeggcutor was actually the biggest challenge to snag, surprisingly, as it nearly killed itself with Shadow End several times. I got it at the last possible turn, before it would've killed itself from the recoil damage. In the battle, the others can wait, get that Exeggcutor before the others go down.
What? You want the birds more? Too bad. You need all the shadows to get Lugia onto your GBA, so consider that Exeggcutor as your purified Lugia.
I sadly made the game a bit too easy just using Vaporeon and the Baltoy one of the Hexagon guys had, but I simply didn't find any other Pokemon I wanted to use at a decent level. The game's only real fault is placing all the good shadows in the end game, which encourages the player to train up the bad shadows. As we all know, training in a Pokemon game makes it all too easy.
Only real problem I see is that I should've put in Electabuzz for Lapras, as Shadow Half would have been very useful, and I had plenty of tanks already. Heh...Looking at the teams, I'm surprised at how many people over-trained and how many used the Teddiursa from the start. I almost was going to, but after snagging the Baltoy and seeing Teddiursa's inferrior level, I dumped it.
Although this game has had the strongest climax of any Pokemon game I've played, ever. All the bosses at the end besides Lovirina, it felt really epic (Although that peon with the Dugtrio inbetween Gorigan and Eldes did hurt it a small bit.). I felt as giddy as a school girl, something I haven't experienced since playing Red for the first time as a child. Only thing that would've really improved it would be putting Lovirina at the end with the other bosses and scrapping the peon with the Dugtrio. Kudos to Pokemon! I look forward to seeing a 3rd Pokemon Colosseum, although it's possible they'll just make more lousy games like Battle Revoloution...